The Man with the Iron Heart

Five got you ten he was born within spitting distance of the Louisiana bayou. After a moment, he went on, “Damfino what either one of ’em’s doin’ here. They’s American critters.”

“Waddaya wanna bet the krauts brung ’em over to raise for fur and they got loose, way nutrias did when we shipped ’em up from South America?” his buddy answered. “My uncle raise nutrias for a while. Then he go bust and sponge offa Pa.”

Lou didn’t give a muskrat’s ass about escaped rodents or the soldier’s sponging uncle. “Spread out,” he told his none too merry men. “God damn it to hell, we are gonna comb this swamp and see what’s in here.”

He hadn’t gone another fifty yards before he realized it was hopeless. A regiment could have gone through here and missed an elephant standing quietly in the shade of the trees. No elephants, or none he saw-the Jerries wouldn’t have brought them in for fur. But with the best will in the world the platoon he led couldn’t have searched the whole swamp in under a year.

And these clowns didn’t have the best will in the world, or anything close to it. They pissed and moaned. They dragged their feet. Reward or not, they couldn’t have cared less about catching Reinhard Heydrich, because they didn’t think he was within miles. As for Fritzi and his rowboat full of illicit tobacco…The only thing that mattered to them was that they were getting muddy and their poor little tootsies were soaked.

More than once, Lou had heard krauts-especially krauts who didn’t know he spoke German-wonder out loud how the hell the USA won the war. He’d never been tempted to wonder the same thing himself…till now.

A gray heron almost as tall as a man made him nervous-all the more so because its plumage was only a little lighter than Feldgrau. But no Landser ever born came equipped with that cold yellow stare or that bayonet beak. The heron’s head darted down. A carp wriggled briefly, then disappeared.

The sun sank toward the western horizon. Clifton said, “No offense, Lieutenant, but we ain’t gonna find him.”

“Yeah,” Lou said, and then several things quite a bit warmer than that. Maybe the GIs posted on the far side of the swamp would scoop Heydrich up when he came out. Lou had to hope so. He wasn’t going to be the hero himself. The Reichsprotektor shouldn’t have got away-but it looked like he had.

XIV

A teletype chattered. Tom Schmidt pulled the flimsy paper off the machine. The dateline was Munich. The headline said, HEYDRICH MOCKS PURSUERS AFTER ESCAPE. The story was…just what you’d expect after a headline like that. The boss of the German national resistance was back in hiding again, and thumbing his nose at the blundering Americans who’d let him slip through their fingers.

“Well, Jesus Christ!” Schmidt said in disgust. “We really can’t do anything right over there, can we?”

“What now?” asked another reporter in the Tribune’s Washington bureau. He was interested enough not to light his cigarette till he got an answer.

Schmidt gave it to him, finishing, “What d’you think of that, Wally?”

Wally did light up before replying, “I think it stinks, that’s what. What am I supposed to think? First the krauts grabbed a bunch of guys with slide rules, then when their own big cheese put his neck on the chopping block we couldn’t bring the goddamn hatchet down. Somebody’s head ought to roll if Heydrich’s didn’t.”

“Sounds right to me,” Tom said. “You know what else?”

“I’m all ears,” Wally said. He wasn’t so far wrong, either; he really did have a pair of jug handles sticking out from the sides of his head.

“I’ll tell you what.” Tom always had liked the sound of his own voice. “This part of the war is harder on us than whipping the Wehrmacht was, that’s what.”

“How d’you figure?” Wally asked.

“’Cause when we were fighting the Wehrmacht we knew who was who and what was what,” Tom said. “Now we’re in the same mess the Nazis got into when they had to fight all the Russian partisans. You can’t tell if the guy selling cucumbers likes you or wants to blow you to kingdom come. And does that pretty girl walking down the street have a bomb in her handbag? How are you supposed to win a fight like that if the other side doesn’t want to let up?”

“Kill ’em all?” Wally suggested.

“We aren’t gonna do that,” Tom said, and the other reporter didn’t disagree with him. After a moment, he added, “Hell, even if we wanted to, I don’t think we could. Hitler’s goons pretty much tried it, and even they couldn’t pull it off. Besides, d’you really wanna imitate the goddamn SS?”

“They didn’t have the atom bomb, so they had to do it retail,” Wally said. “We could do it wholesale.”

“Maybe we could, but we won’t,” Tom said. “Ain’t gonna happen-no way, nohow. I almost wish it would. It’s the only thing that could get us out of the deep shit we walked into.”

“Either that or just packing up and going home,” Wally said. “You oughta write the rest of it up. It’d make a good column, y’know, especially if you use the Heydrich story for a hook.”

“Damned if it wouldn’t.” Tom carried his filthy mug over to the coffee pot that sat on a hot plate in the corner of the room. The pot had been there since sunup, and it was late afternoon now. The black, steaming stuff that came out when he poured would have stripped paint from a destroyer’s gun turret. Adulterated with plenty of cream and sugar, it also tickled brain cells.

Tom ran a sheet of paper into his Underwood and started banging away. When things went well, he could pound out a column in forty-five minutes. This was one of those times. He passed it to Wally when he finished.

“Strong stuff,” the other reporter said, nodding. “Truman’ll call you every kind of name under the sun.”

“Okay by me,” Tom said. “Only thing I want to know now is, what’ll the guys back in Chicago do to me?”

“If you don’t like getting edited, you shoulda written books instead of going to work for the papers,” Wally said.

“Nah,” Tom replied. “I’ll never get rich at this racket, but I won’t starve, either. You try writing books for a living, you better already have somebody rich in the family. Yeah, I don’t like what the editors do sometimes, but I can live with it. A regular paycheck helps a lot.”

“You think I’m gonna argue with you?” Wally shook his head. “Not me, Charlie. I got two kids, and a third on the way.”

Schmidt’s column ran in the Tribune the next day. At the President’s next press conference, Truman said, “I didn’t imagine anybody could make me think a guttersnipe like Westbrook Pegler was a gentleman, but this Schmidt character shows me I was wrong.” Tom felt as if he’d been giving the accolade.

Then Walter Lippmann, who was staunchly on the side of keeping American troops in Germany till the cows came home, attacked him in print. Up till then, Lippmann had never deigned to acknowledge that he existed, much less that he was worth attacking. Tom fired back in another column, one that drew him even more notice than the first had. He was as happy as Larry.

Every once in a while, though, he got reminded of what his happiness was built on. As if to celebrate Heydrich’s escape, the diehards blew up an American ammunition dump on the outskirts of Regensburg. The blast killed forty-five GIs, and wounded a number the War Department coyly declined to state. It broke windows ten miles away.

A survivor was quoted as saying, “I thought one of those atomic whatsits went off.”

How do we let things like this happen? Tom wrote. And if we can’t keep things like this from happening, why do we go on wasting our young men’s lives in a fight we can’t hope to win? Wouldn’t it be better to come home, let the Germans sort things out among themselves, and use our bombers and our atomic whatsits to make sure they can never threaten us again? Sure looks that way to me. He paused. That wasn’t quite a strong enough kicker. He added one more line-Sure looks that way to more and more Americans, too.

No Brigadier General summoned to testify before Congress ever looked happy. In Jerry Duncan’s experience, that was as much a law of nature as any of the ones Sir Isaac Newton discovered. This particular brass hat-his name, poor bastard, was Rudyard Holmyard-looked as if he’d just taken a big bite out of a fertilizer sandwich.